A speech that holds so much lasting meaning is not born overnight, but developed over the course of experiences. Most ordinary people never have experiences that hurl them into national prominence like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. These are the people who changed the way life in the world was lived and changed history.

Without regard to their own personal safety, heroes are lifted forward as those around them take up their cause and assist in that cause. In remembering Martin Luther King on his Day of Celebration and Rosa Parks in the 100-year anniversary of her birth, do something meaningful, if not on Martin Luther Kind Day, then do something to help someone this 100-year anniversary of Rosa Parks' birth.

Florence “FloJo” Joyner's fans nicknamed her FloJo long before there was a J.Lo on the scene. FloJo won three gold medals in Olympics track and field and set still-unbroken track records. Like J.Lo, FloJo, too, could have been in the movies with looks that rival many Hollywood stars. Florence FloJo Joyner was so much more than a gold medal runner in the Olympics. She raised the standards of beauty not only in track and field but also in the ordinary world, where her style changed the image of female runners and raised the appreciation the world had for the beauty of black women, in particular. Influencing every woman in America as she graced finish lines, FloJo was a winner of gold medals in the Olympics and so much more than the fastest woman in the world. Florence FloJo Joyner would have a birthday coming up on December 21. She would turn 53. But knowing this incredibly astonishing beauty, she would still be creating and exuding her familiar elegance and style, and still teaching American women how to stay in their running shoes.

Throughout history, sex was a weapon of oppression against women--black and white--both of whom were at the core of protest movements. When Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she became the active symbol of the modern civil rights movement, which had begun in the earliest history of the United States when violated slave women and their betrayed mistresses began organizing methods to object to their treatment. Plantation mistress, Mary Chestnut documented in her Diary from Dixie the violations of slave women and the uneasy toleration of the resulting mulatto kin that this violation and betrayal produced in the slave quarters. If not for the women--black and white--involved in the turmoil of protest from the beginning, long before Rosa Parks, there would never have been a civil rights movement.